Solar Eclipse
by Jane Penderwick
Summary: This is an attempt to cure my writers block. Skye and Jeffrey have always been inevitable. It's written in the stars. One-shot.


_Solar Eclipse _

_I am struggling with the dreadful disease you all know well… writers block. I think I will be able to kick it with lots of writing and experimenting. This is an experiment and something that is very much outside of my comfort zone. It is for the sake of getting the creative juices flowing and is almost comically far from perfect. You should see some great diversity in the style and mood of the piece (this is both for poetic reasons and because I have been working on it intermittently) as well as some great diversity in the way I portray these characters. I also have a blatant disregard for the rules of grammar here (even with capitalization!). I hope this doesn't offend anyone. I also kind of randomly switch point of view very briefly in the middle. I hope this doesn't cause too much confusion. Skye and Jeffrey will likely fall in and out of character frequently. This being said, I hope you all enjoy it :) Please have an open mind. It is out there. (Set in Boston except for the first few lines. Skye and Jeffrey are both in college)_

_I do not own the Penderwicks._

* * *

Jeffrey watched her rise like the sun.

Her golden hair and pale slender limbs shafts of light, filtering through his windows too early in the morning and hurting his eyes. They always told him to never look directly into the sun, and she was his sun, so he never met her piecing looks. But he knew just how many shades of blue he would find there.

They spent a long summer night lying on the roof looking up at the stars. Her eyelids were heavy and Jeffrey could peek between them like they were curtains, into a person that was different entirely, yet completely the same. "You are my moon." She mumbled it softly, through lips too tired to speak with her usual sharpness. Where usually they marched out, biting, these seemed to waltz, spinning Jeffrey's mind around. _Her_ moon.

He figured that all things came with time. He began to pick apart her walls of protection brick by brick, filing away the mortar with sand paper, scared to scare her. But she was so far way, his sun. 406,000 km.

In his absence, stars flirted with her, asking her to dance around the sky. But they would never understand that she _was _the sky.

He felt no fear. He had faith in fated things like solar eclipses.

But he was losing his religion. Skye let her defenses down to a boy who took a sledge hammer of persistence to her walls of protection. Jeffrey painted a smile on his face a shade of blue (much like that of the sky) as he watched her not minding as this boy- this boy that could never know the beauty of her messy hair and eyes that could make mountains tremble-ripped through her heart and her secrets like they weren't sacred.

His drought of hope was longer than he would have had ever thought, as this boy-who was atrocious at soccer but spoke fluent calamity physics in an accent she apparently found charming-stayed longer than he hoped. It wasn't a passing glance she gave this boy, but a stare that Jeffrey thought previously was only reserved for him.

The boy had her heart between his thumb and first finger.

Skye had Jeffrey wrapped around her littlest finger.

Unrequited love sucks.

Jeffrey had been saying this since they were sixteen and he first realized she was the one his life revolved around. That the sun was the middle of the universe, His universe. But she was just saying this now to him, calling from a phone booth, her throat tight with tears that she would never let fall. The boy who spoke the accent of science had done her wrong.

She told him that she was five blocks away from his apartment in a parking garage. She told him that she needs to get away from school and that she drove here because it was closer to her college of math and science than the Penderwick home was. He prayed to God that this wasn't the only reason.

He picked her up, dripping wet from the rain. She had no extra clothes with her. He told her that she could stay the night.

She never spoke that boy's name. Not even when he asked her to tell him what happened over a nine o'clock p.m. coffee. She smelled like the rain, but saltier, because of the tears. The drought had ended, but a hurricane filled its place. A broken hearted girl can't love you like _that._

She slept that night next to him on the four poster bed. Not out of a desire of hers to be close to him, mind you, but simply because they were stubborn. She was too stubborn to let him be chivalrous and sleep on the couch or the floor and he was too stubborn to be selfish and take the bed for himself, so they laid shoulder to shoulder now, in compromise. His cheeks burned when she smirked at his music note bed sheets, but the smirk was the closest she had gotten to a smile all night so he swallowed his pride. She was wearing his shirt, because it was dry. That felt significant. He stayed up and watched her sleep. He could blame it on the coffee, but this would be a lie. He blamed it on the girl. She was his truth.

_The next morning she watched him rise before the sun_.

His digital clock is too bright, declaring five o'clock with confidence. She feels him shift against her in his sleep and she wonders why Jane is always so bothered with words when they are so limited. There was not a word in the English language to describe the way he moved against her just then. She looks at him. His features are highlighted just right by the moonlight. He seems to be made of moonlight. He glows softly, never so much so that you have to shield your eyes. He is a reflection of the sun.

His eyes opened into hers the color of fresh cut celery, and she could see herself reflected there. A softened reflection of a too harsh sun. His freckles on his nose looked like stars or little numbered dots of ink asking to be connected, arranged into amateur drawings. But for once, she let them be chaotic, disorganized. It felt symbolic somehow.

He was all boy, with no cream or sugar in his place to sweeten her coffee, so they went out for breakfast. He was comfortable, like her mother's old sheets stashed in the attic back home. He fit, like her old college sweaters that she wished she had brought here. He was always there, like the great celestial bodies in her night sky.

Like a moon.

His knee brushed hers under the table. And so began the series of subtle touches that scared her more than any of the Great Unknowns of science.

Their hands tangle when he hands her an extra sugar packet.

He puts a hand on her back, helping her into his car.

He brushes back her hair.

She did not go home that night. He lay next to her and counted her breaths until he fell asleep.

_He watches as she rises like the sun._

She is standing at the window, hair a golden halo in the first rays of morning light. She is bathed in light. And Skye looks at home in it. Her features are highlighted in just the right ways… she wears the light like some girls wear makeup.

He stands next to her. She speaks first.

"I have to go home."

"You are home."

"My clothes aren't here."

"Then bring them here."

"I have school."

"It is a twenty minute commute by train."

"What will my father say?"

"Your father likes me."

"Don't be cocky. He will think we are sleeping together."

"We are sleeping together."

She slaps him, playfully. He hugs her. She spins away. Always spinning away. On an axis, in an orbit. He comes close but never close enough. Always spinning. Spinning. A perpetual Merry-go-round. An elliptical orbit.

He makes her coffee, now filled with so much cream and sugar he hardly thinks it classifies as coffee anymore. They stand on the balcony. She leans forward against the railing like she might just fly away… float off and join the clouds. Like the sun. _His sun._

Her eyes are shut contently. He notices that even her eyelashes are gold. Sunlight is in her hair. She smiles. Sunlight is in her mouth.

"What happened with him?"

There is no more sunlight in her mouth.

"He left."

_I stayed._

"Did you love him?" His breath is caught in his lungs.

_I have loved you all along._

"I did."

What a world! He waited while another man taught her to love. What an insane world.

"Do you still?" His insides twisted. She had grown into a thing inside of him. Like a cyst, but one he didn't mind so much. He would let her kill him if she liked.

"No."

_Ah._

"But I hurt."

_As do I._

"I have to go." She whispers into the curve of his ear. But it is like the sun whispered. Everything living seemed to shutter. Or at least he did.

"Come back." He wished he sounded more confident but it sounded like a question. The Greatest Question.

She shakes her head sadly, but there is an odd smile that tugs at the corners of her lips.

"If he could break me, then you…" Another shake of the head. "I will be a glass doll in your hands. You will shatter me."

_I have a pianist's hands. They are strong. I will not drop you._

He watches her drive away.

Old rubber soles on pavement. Running between shadows and pools of light spilled onto the middle of the road by the sun. "Skye! Wait!"

Taillights. My God, he loved taillights. She stopped the car and looked out at him, blue eyes deep like the ocean. Deep like the sky. But like the sky, they were a mask of the star encrusted _other side._ The side that was an inky black and full of stars and rockets and a girl that was just a girl afraid of love.

"I love you." Raw. Unaltered. Words are best when not full of glitter and helium. Her sister would disagree.

"I love you too."

These are not the words that he was expecting and he doesn't know what to do with them now that she has put them back in his mouth. They taste surprisingly bittersweet on his tongue. He nods and backs away, shielding his eyes against the morning light as her car disappears.

He sleeps on the balcony. If she is not in fact the death of him, she will surely be the cause of his back problems. He stares up at the sky. He counts stars and draws constellations that all resemble her silhouette. He makes wishes on anything that moves.

When he wakes up the morning with the sun and smells coffee and light brewing inside and sees a familiar green jeep parked out in the street he knows that it wasn't a wish granted by the silver orbs of plasma. It was something bigger. Destiny maybe. Improbable chance. Luck. An incorrect address on her GPS.

No.

Love.

And when they kiss, the sun and moon finally meet. A solar eclipse. It feels fated, like it was written in the stars.

* * *

_So tell me what you think. I would like to say that I am not so driven by reviews but… what can I say? They make me want to write more. This is weird, and totally not my style which is usually more… classic… so a review might help me see where I stand with this writing style. I threw a reference to __Special Topics in Calamity Physics__ in there, I don't know if any of you have read it?_


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